Two weeks ago, after the Sinclair Broadcast Group opted to stop payment to the San Diego Padres for their right to televise games, Major League Baseball took back broadcasting rights for the team, one which is among the most exciting in the sport and which holds the highest payroll in baseball outside of the city of New York. Sinclair, which owns the Bally Sports family of regional networks which includes St. Louis Cardinals broadcaster Bally Sports Midwest, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March, putting the future broadcasting revenues of the fourteen MLB teams under the Bally umbrella in serious jeopardy.

Last week, longtime St. Louis Blues color commentator Darren Pang left his role with Bally Sports Midwest after fourteen years as the team’s lead commentator in order to take a similar job with the Chicago Blackhawks. Although there were several reasons that the Blackhawks may have been appealing to Pang–it was the NHL team with which the former goaltender spent his entire career, it is a much larger market, and the opportunity to announce the games of once-in-a-generation presumptive number-one overall draft pick Connor Bedard are appealing–Dan Caesar of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Pang’s primary motivation was financial. Pang acknowledged that negotiations for a new contract had been very slow and that NBC Sports Chicago was far more aggressive than the seemingly less stable Bally Sports Midwest.

The direct impact of these two stories on the St. Louis Cardinals, on or off the field, is minimal–perhaps a marginal decrease in shared revenue with the collapse of the Padres deal which is no less than the decrease for other MLB teams, and while Darren Pang was popular with St. Louis sports fans, it is unlikely that his departure is going to reduce in a material reduction of Bally Sports Midwest subscribers. But they are a potential harbinger of future instability for a Cardinals franchise that famously, for better and worse, tends to want locked-in certainty above all else.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of attending Blogger Day at Busch Stadium, and during the pregame Q&A segment with St. Louis Cardinals President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak, I asked him about the organization’s level of concern regarding Bally Sports and the future of the team’s broadcasts.

For all of the criticism that John Mozeliak receives for his defensive answers to questions about the team, not the least of which has come from me, I find this hesitancy to be understandable, if occasionally irritating. His job, ultimately, is not to entertain the fans but to act as a liaison between Cardinals ownership and Cardinals customers, to give the fans just enough to placate them but to keep the best interests of those who sign his checks at heart. I also, in the handful of times I’ve had the chance to meet Mozeliak, find him to be pleasant and dryly funny. So rather than being starstruck, or taking a bunch of cheap shots at Mozeliak (which, frankly, would probably generate more clicks than what I am going to do), I believe the best service I can provide is a breakdown of what John Mozeliak answered to my question.

Mozeliak quotes in bold below.

“Here in St. Louis…we are blessed with people tuning in. So right now, I think (Sinclair) see the Cardinals as a pretty safe haven right now.”

I tend to be as skeptical as anybody about those who talk up how popular the St. Louis Cardinals are because it is easy to turn it into a litmus test for fan worthiness. But it is a simple, bland statement of fact to note that the St. Louis Cardinals have a large local fan base. Unlike with the National Football League or the National Basketball Association, which have regional components but have a largely national and international scope in terms of its marketing, Major League Baseball is effectively America’s largest regional sport, and the Cardinals are titans of it–per Forbes in 2022, the Cardinals had easily the highest local TV ratings in baseball. But the San Diego Padres also ranked in the top five. Unlike the Cardinals, who have at least some local competition for sporting attention with the St. Louis Blues and St. Louis City SC, the San Diego Padres are the only major professional sports team in its market; it is the only market in MLB which does not also have an NFL, NBA, or NHL team.

St. Louis and San Diego are comparably sized markets, though I will concede that St. Louis’s footprint extends well beyond Greater St. Louis in ways which are much less the case with a San Diego Padres team which faces competition for fans with an MLB team which plays games a 90 minute drive north, a five hour and 13 minute drive east, and perhaps soon, a sub-five hour drive northeast. But the San Diego Padres are as hot of a property as they have arguably ever been, and to dismiss concern about the collapse of their television deal, even if Mozeliak was playing the public relations game, comes across as naïve.

“It’s no secret that the reality of how people consume things on their television, whether it’s movies, sports, live entertainment…it comes down to streaming. So ultimately, where do the streaming rights take you and who oversees that? Is that something that’s going to be governed by something like MLB, or is it going to be where we’re using a third party?”

MLB, of course, has a streaming package already, and it’s, criticisms about repetitive advertisements aside, a broadly very strong one. But the problem from a fan perspective is that most fans live within the blackout area of their favorite team. As a St. Louis resident, I would happily pay a premium for a (legal) MLB TV service if it included access to St. Louis Cardinals games. But Twitter complaints about archaic blackout restrictions aside, the reason these blackouts exist is not because Rob Manfred Hates Baseball or whatever–it’s because MLB teams have a significant share of their revenue tied up in television contracts. It’s the reason that the potential collapse of Bally Sports could have a major impact on the sport as a whole.

I appreciated John Mozeliak’s realism regarding streaming–Major League Baseball has found itself in a contradictory situation where live sports are one of the things keeping cable television alive in an era of on-demand streaming, but the appeal of streaming is also keeping potential fans away from the sport. I didn’t exactly come of age as a baseball fan in an era without choices–cable very much existed–but the option to pull up deep libraries of movies and television shows without ever getting off your couch is a miracle of modern technology. It’s a good thing sports got me hopelessly hooked before I had access to basically the entire history of film, television, and music at my fingertips, because it seems objectively irrational to watch sports.

Major League Soccer had a potentially game-changing streaming turn in 2023 with the Apple TV-based MLS Season Pass–there are a handful of games per week available on over-the-air or cable television as well as for free (without a required paid subscription) on Apple TV, but for most games, without regard to one’s region, a $14.99/month subscription is required. The difference, however, is that Major League Baseball is a far higher revenue-producing league–MLB is second only to the NFL in terms of worldwide revenue generated, while MLS ranks tenth (and is greatly benefited by volume of teams–on a per-team basis, it ranks 14th).

It might be worth it for MLB teams to sacrifice some short-term revenue in order to make the league more broadly appealing for younger demographics, who in turn would be more likely to support the league down the road. It’s the kind of plan I could see John Mozeliak preferring, but ultimately, it won’t be front office personnel who make those decisions. It will be owners. Whether Bill DeWitt Jr., or any other owner, would be willing to sacrifice short-term revenue for long-term stability is an open question.

“We want people who want to watch the game to be able to watch it…the reality is the best model of all might be ‘Hey, game’s showing’, you purchase it for that given night. You don’t want to watch, you don’t have to pay. But a subscription model is probably going to be what we’ll end up doing in some form.”

The reference to pay-as-you-go game purchasing received quite a bit of negative attention on social media, despite it being a thing that Mozeliak mentioned in passing and then quickly dismissed (it is fair to ask why he bothered to bring it up in the first place, but it’s worth noting that he did not know what my question was going to be and none of the prior questions gave him any particular priming for this particular inquiry). But honestly, I think this model makes less sense for MLB than it would for fans. The subscription model makes sense because fans pay and then don’t think about it–I have a cable subscription that I largely have to watch Cardinals games, but on Friday, I watched the game at a bar, on Saturday I attended the game, and this afternoon I’m attending again, so the Cardinals would get zero dollars from me on the weekend. An a la carte option might make sense, but if you had to make a conscious choice for each game, as annoying as that would be for die-hard fans, it would be a disaster for teams.

The subscription model is going to likely continue, but the exact details will almost certainly need to change if baseball hopes to survive with a generation of cord-cutters. Under the status quo, local regional sports networks are often omitted from channel listings altogether, and while that is a major loss for fans, it is an existential loss for Major League Baseball, because while some fans will be convinced to pay extra, in a world with more entertainment options than ever, most will move along. Some will stay away from baseball forever not out of principle but out of convenience. And in the long term, baseball cannot afford this kind of apathy.